CHICAGO ON ICE

"Chicago is probably the most successful experiment ever in group therapy."

Chicago is a city filled with dirty gray politicians, black leather policemen, and several varieties of cancerous looking trees instead of greenery. The pigeons vote. The rain gets cold in October, too.

Rock concerts can be a drag. Consider the Stadium — not merely content with being a cow palace, it’s an ice rink, and the Blackhawks kill hockey pucks there for 18,000 beer-crazed maniacs. On Friday nights, though, the Stadium becomes a concert hall, and in honor of the occasion the ice is covered with a wet red carpet and a thousand extra seats. Needless to say, Stadium seats are cold.

This Friday night it’s Chicago in Chicago at the Stadium, which means 20,000 dancing, screaming people will appear, dressed in long underwear, two pair of socks and T-shirts. Chicago — let’s see, that’s Bobby Lamm on keyboards, Terry Kath on guitar, Pete Cetera on bass, Jimmy Pankow, Lee Loughnane and Walt Parazaider on brass, Danny Seraphine on drums, and Laudir De Olivera on a million congas. I know the names of all the seven dwarves too, should you ever want to "know: Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, and Bashful.

“Define Chicago?” says Bobby Lamm, the group’s composer expresso. “Well, I think it’s probably the most successful experiment ever in group therapy. I think that we’re a phenomenon in that we’re still around after eight years, and that we’ve maintained a pretty constant artistic level with only a couple of low points. But I still think of the group as an experiment.

“Everything is done in a group therapy manner. We have these things called business meetings two or three times a year — but they’re not business. They’re ‘you said that to me and you shouldn’t' have,’ and ‘you did that and I didn’t like it,’ and ‘I know I did that and I’m sorry’ - all the little things come out and we talk about them, and that’s how we stay together.

“Most of the objectives that we had as a group when we started were pretty vague. At first we just wanted to get a band together that could cook and play any style of music. Then the objective changed to working steady, and then it changed to moving to California, and on and on and on.

“I figure the fifth album brought us full cycle. From the beginning — whatever stage that was — to being underground darlings, to being AM superstars, to being doped-out freaks, to being guilt-ridden wealthy freaks and all that, so by the time we recorded album five, it was like a new beginning for us.”

“I have to admit that it does seem kind of strange to me to have my solo album out, and the stuff with the seventh album, and to be touring with the group, all at the same time. But I don’t know how other people look at it. The feeling of everybody in the group, from the very beginning, was that anything that anybody wants to do at any time was OK with everybody else. In other words, if you had another project, or you wanted to play with other

people, if you wanted to do anything — that was fine, as long as the group remained intact. There was no doubt that the group would always remain intact.”

Chicago has a smooth stage show — slick music, eight hundred thousand different colored lights, two 30 by 40 foot closed-circuit technicolor television screens, and a dozen sick-looking potted palms.

Backstage seems to be less schizoid than is usually the case with a brandname road show. There are a handful of spaced-out roadies, complete with empty beer cans; another twenty or so stage hands and lighting technicians who are in better condition because they have to work; the usual assortment of boxes, promoters, photographers, writers, once-a-year friends and other strangers. The Forces of Law and Order have provided enough guards, cops, and putty-faced bouncers to keep any Situation under Control. A strange-looking lady with a JOSHUA TELEVISON Tshirt wanders around taking mysterious notes and bumming cigarettes. Happily, the ever-present two-fisted double barreled glitter babies are kept down to a bare minimum of glit.

“‘Crazy Way to Spend a Year’ is a road song,” says Bobby, in response to further inquiry on his solo album, Skinny Boy. “I wrote most of the lyrics sitting in a dirt-floor arena in Kansas City, or one of those places — I think it

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There was no doubt that the group would always remain intact.

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was Omaha, Nebraska. Working the Road constantly has got to be one of the most miserable, punishing things •you can do to yourself. But there’s only so many things you can say about Being On The Road without quitting. Up until the fifth album, most of my life was involved with being Chicago, being a musician, Being On The Road, and writing. There’s a limit to anyone’s experience. If you don’t live at least an expanded life, or at least expand your horizons a little bit, pretty soon you don’t have things to relate to and write1 about and you run out of influences and inspirations. So, ‘Crazy Way to Spend a Year’ was the end of just being on the road and just thinking in terms of Chicago. We’ve all broadened our horizons — we’re doing television now, and doing television was a major step. Doing a solo album was a major step for me. I’ve produced a documentary film. I’ve been traveling a lot, I spend a couple of weeks every year in Paris. I meet people that aren’t in the music business, and I can do other things that interest me.

“We spent years playing two-part concerts, and I guess we were getting lazy, so we did some tours with War, and we used Fanny, and the Pointer Sisters — always travel with girls if you can. They were successful concerts, but the reviews weren’t as good, we didn’t play as well, and we didn’t get off. We were going through our very esoteric period, I guess, where we were really pretty arrogant. It took a couple of tours, and a lot of bad reviews, and a lot of disappointed people before we found out we were just screwing around.”

“There’s a lot of people that maybe only go to one concert a year. If you don’t play what they came to hear, then you’ve wasted their time and their money. So we decided to go back to doing two-part concerts, and the first night we did it, everybody knew it was the right thing. We get to play everything we want to play — anything that we want to stretch out, there’s time enough to do it — plus we can play everything the people came to hear.”

Watching the road crew tear down the stage is a trip. The last encore is played, the house lights come up, and classical music drifts out of the P.A. system in a psychological attempt at crowd evacuation. 250 square feet of television screen float down to the ground. The stage lights evaporate, along with three million miles of electrical cables. Several tons of sound equipment disappear into the appropriate shipping crates, like the world’s biggest assortment of Christmas presents. The sound of a thousand folding chairs clatters in the background, and in fifteen minutes the stage is down to its bare bones. The potted palms get trashed. Another ten minutes, and all that remains of a once-dynamite concert is a huge red rug cut in the shape of a slowly-melting hockey rink. There’s nothing left to do but go home.